Sarah Pickard: Politics, Protest and Young People
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Sarah Pickard: Politics, Protest and Young People London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, 501 pages Julius Elster 1 Received: 16 July 2020 / Revised: 2 August 2020 / Accepted: 7 August 2020 # Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
The important premise that generalistic, homogeneous and deterministic tendencies should be avoided when portraying youths threads its way through Sarah Pickard’s lucidly written Politics, Protest and Young People. Pickard shares this premise with the growing body of youth studies literature, which increasingly aims to understand youths in heterogeneous ways and dispel the myths about young people as apathetic. The same cannot be said about the approach adopted by large sections of the British media and polity, especially with respect to understanding young people’s political participation. Pickard’s long-term research project not only does shed light on how the mainstream media and the political elite repeatedly neglect the rich plurality of political engagement across the youth demographic, but also seeks out an alternative approach to the dominant one. Divided into 15 chapters, the book’s interdisciplinary perspective weaves together several thematic and empirical strands, where both qualitative and quantitative analyses are employed (inspired by Einstein’s maxim that ‘not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted’). The result is a realistic account of, and a versatile toolbox for understanding, politically committed young people inside and outside the ballot box in twenty-first century Britain. Politics, Protest and Young People begins by setting the stage for how concepts are applied and understood in the rest of the book. The discussion here will be familiar to readers of the Journal of Applied Youth Studies. Besides shedding light on why it is important not to lump all young people together into a homogeneous block (p. 27; see also p. 469), Pickard uses this early chapter to outline the following: (1) whom she means by ‘young people’, (2) the inconsistent legislative boundaries surrounding young people, and (3) the development of terms used to denominate young people, such as adolescents, teenagers, youngsters, youths, followed by generational labels, such as Millennials and Generation Z. With respect to (3), one might take issue with Pickard’s decision to discard the term ‘youths’. For Pickard, this term (especially, in the plural) ‘tends to promote the ‘young people as a problem’ narrative and are mostly inappropriate when writing about young people and political participation’ (pp. 28, 31– * Julius Elster [email protected]
1
London Metropolitan University, 166–220 Holloway Road, London N7 8DB, UK
Journal of Applied Youth Studies
42). Language matters when referring to young people, but the word ‘youths’, one may argue, should not be understood, per se, as a determinant as to how those identified as such must be seen. So, if it is the ‘young-people-are-a-problem’ narrative that is responsible for the perpetuation of negative ster
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